…Before the Dawn
by Anne Hedonia
Summary: How dark does it get when the lights go out...in space? Rose gets cloudy; she and the Doctor get clear.  Nine/Rose


Rose is rethinking everything she's ever thought about the word "dark."

All because of this dark. This is the darkest dark ever. It's fallen over the TARDIS like a gag over a mouth. Her eyes have not adjusted in the slightest because there's not one spare lumen in the entire ship for them to detect. No vague shapes, no shadows, no muddy glimmers off objects' surfaces–every bit of visual information has been taken away. Rose thinks she could grasp handfuls of this dark and it would ooze out her fingers.

The lights are out — as well as practically every other function on the TARDIS - because apparently the TARDIS has blown a fuse. The Doctor insists that's not what's happened but it's the analogy that makes the most sense to Rose so she's ignoring his incensed clucking on the matter and thinking whatever she wants.

Rose is perfectly warm when she shivers. This is darkness you can feel, a dark there's no cure for. There's no way at all to invite any light in, not here in cold, cold space. The protective bubble that keeps them safe from zero atmosphere is down; there's no way to even just open the door and call in some relief from a nebulae light years away. She thinks about that for a second: the nearest illumination is _light years away_. She feels alone in this darkness, even with the Doctor right next to her, swearing soft, disembodied curses.

"Hand me the socket spanner." He's seated next to her on the grating. She hears the familiar fidgeting as he dangles his feet into the open hatch.

"How'm I s'posed to know where the socket spanner is?"

There's no doubt he's rolling his eyes. "Feel around for it."

"Yeah, but your spanners aren't regular spanners–they have all these mad bumpy bits and twist in twelve different directions and–"

"JUST–" he interrupts, "–do the best you can."

The dark makes his voice sound foreign, showing her new aspects. His harsh tones are jagged and feel like a slap, but when he soothes her it's like a lullaby sung in a language only she understands.

She leans out from her cross-legged position and gingerly feels past the thick blanket they're sitting on and onto the sharp blades of flooring, an ordinary feature turned suddenly dangerous. She knows the TARDIS would never intentionally hurt her but…in a way the TARDIS isn't here. She runs her fingertips over some objects she believes to be of Earthly origin and some she'd never guess if she had a million years. She finds the spanner and leans back up, follows the sound of the Doctor's breathing and his warmth to where he has to be. She estimates the height of his shoulder by where her head usually lands on it when they're sitting, puts it there just to be sure. She feels his head turn, imagines his look of amusement as she feels down his arm and wraps his fingers around the tool she's found.

"How's'at?" she asks.

She hears the metal pieces of the tool moving against each other. "Just right," he says, more kindly than she expected.

She doesn't want to lean up so she stays there as he goes back to work, feels the muscles in his shoulder move, making her head shift against it. He doesn't say anything.

Minutes pass and Rose nonsensically closes her eyes against this darkness. It feels like it lurks inches from her, leering with a lurid grin, waiting for the right moment to scream "boo."

After a bit the Doctor says something perfectly terrible.

"Back in a tic–gotta go change a settin' in the other room."

"I'll come with," she says instantly.

"No, I can see better than you can–you're likely to get hurt."

Rose panics a little, maybe more than a little. "I can hold on to your jacket or somethin'."

"Well, _this_ is one for the books." She can hear his crooked grin. "You're not afraid of the dark, are you, Rose Tyler?"

For once she doesn't answer his teasing in kind; she's still leaning against his shoulder and isn't going to move unless he makes her. "Not usually, but this dark's different. Bein' in the dark…in space…" She suddenly feels she needs a breath. "It just feels so…huge, like it's never-ending. It…feels alive."

"Huh," he muses, mostly to himself, and she feels the noise echo through his chest. "Very unusual."

"What?"

"Never met a human sensitive to this sort of thing," he says without the slightest judgment. "You're detectin' changes in the environment most can't."

"Like what?" she asks, mostly to make him stay.

His shoulder moves as he shrugs. "The TARDIS is givin' off a very specific kind of radiation right now, as well as emitting some subsonic frequencies. Happens when she and I run these diagnostic procedures like we are. The combination can really mess with some species' heads, make 'em tense or paranoid, even hallucinate. But humans never notice, least not normally. I never imagined you'd do." He pushes her up gently and she hears his clothes move and his boots' muffled clang on the blanket. "But if you are feelin' spooked, just remember that's all it is - a few stray frequencies messin' with your head. Shouldn't get any worse, and you already know there's not a single thing on board my ship that'll hurt you," he assures gently, warmly–his thumb and forefinger grasp her chin loosely and she realizes he's squatting in front of her. "Stay right here and you'll be fine. I'll hurry."

His warmth moves away and now she feels chilled and she really wants to yell after him but it seems pathetic. Not a Tyler way to do things, especially not when her only assignment is to sit in one place. She can certainly accomplish that. She's faced down a big, drooling Jagrafess and a Dalek ready to kill her, for pity's sake. Being afraid in itself won't kill her.

Minutes go by, during which it becomes harder and harder to breathe.

In the back of her head, she keeps thinking she hears wind howling, until she focuses her attention on it and then it's gone. Maybe the TARDIS has vents that are echoing. But then why don't they echo when she listens? She starts when she hears a sharp noise, followed by something like a murmur. She remembers the Doctor is moving around fixing things and tries to make her breathing slow and regular. He said she was sensitive, feeling things just because the atmosphere is different. She holds onto that thought, feeling desperate. The sound repeats. She scoots close to a strut, locating it from vague memory and wraps her arms around it like a small child hiding behind a parent's leg.

Another sound, this time more like a step–but not the Doctor's step. She knows his sounds. Her heart pounds painfully. "Doctor?" she calls out. "Y'almost done?"

Scuffling sounds, the noise of small things scooting past. She has no idea what could be making them, and when she tries to figure it out her line of thought gets tangled. More murmuring, with more voices. She imagines they're saying her name.

The Doctor said to sit still. The Doctor said something else about being afraid. The Doctor is somewhere. Her brain is like quicksand, swallowing her thoughts whole.

She hears a laugh, right behind her head.

A shrieking, ghoulish cackle. She jumps and screams like a horror movie heroine. "DOCTOR!"

She feels something swoop by her, more than once. It's low and then it's high and then it's right near her. She's shaking violently and can't decide if she should leap up and flee–she doesn't want to run into it, but she doesn't want to sit still till it runs into her. Her thoughts won't collect, they're confetti in a hurricane when suddenly she knows there are hands slithering onto hers, cold and bony and covered with what feels like raw chicken skin. She shrieks again and tries to shake them off, but they clench around her wrists and won't let go. They're working their way up her forearms. She wrenches wildly. Suddenly she's sure they're the Doctor's hands–the Doctor's just not what she thought. The Doctor's been this since they met and he never told her. The Doctor's been turned into this. The Doctor's been consumed by it. It's killed the Doctor. It keeps changing in her head and won't stop. The cold flesh won't let her go and the laughter's coming back…she fights for her life, pulls free and falls to the knife-like grating. She can't get to her feet in her panic, turns and crawls and runs into shins and starts backward in horror, screaming.

"Whoa whoa WHOA!"

Hands catch her arms again, this time warm but she knows she has to kill whatever it is, has to escape it or die trying. The hands pull her up and against something solid, feeling remarkably like a chest. They try to subdue her but she can't stop.

"Rose! Calm down! I've got you, you're safe!"

The ends of her hair whip her face as she thrashes. "LET GO!"

"Rose, it's me!" It's the Doctor's voice and the deep tones wash over her like a benediction, but she can't trust it.

Her own voice is shrill. "How do I know it's you?"

"Who _else _would it be?"

"I dunno! Wasn't you the last time you came back!"

"What?"

"It grabbed me!" she shrieks. "It told me you were dead!"

The voice when it speaks again understands something now. "Rose, you've been hallucinating. The things that are talking to you aren't real."

"Well, you're a thing talkin' to me! How do I know you're real?"

"Because I'm–!" He stops. "You want proof?"

She nods then realizes he probably can't see it. "Yes."

The large hands promptly take her smaller ones and deposit them on the cool, fragile shells of a pair of over-large ears.

A shaky laugh bursts out of her, all nervous relief. When he speaks his voice is smiling. "Now is that me or not?"

She nods again, pointlessly. She's shaking too hard to talk. The fog still occupies her brain, though it's showing the first signs of clearing. She tries to ignore the background murmurs and whooshing sounds and concentrate on the voice that sounds like home.

"The atmosphere's on its way back to normal," it says. "You're gonna feel better in just a few minutes." The big warm hands slide down to the middle of her forearms, judging the violence of her tremors. She hears a sharp, soft inhalation.

"Rose, I had no idea…" the voice whispers, shocked.

He pulls her into a hug but she can't seem to relax into it. It's still just impenetrable blackness and a torso and arms and she needs him unmistakeable. She pulls back.

"Rose," he says in faint, pained exasperation, "what else can I do to prove–" He stops when her hands slide onto his face to cover both sides of his nose.

"All right, now you're just rubbin' it in," he chuckles.

She doesn't laugh back and her hands don't move. She can't get her hands to leave his face. Things are still echoing in her mind, distinctions aren't completely clear and her voice still wobbles. "S'not enough yet…" Her hands smooth down to rest, butterfly light, on his lips, tracing their shape.

"What?" His lips move under her finger pads.

She speaks just loud enough to be heard in what she knows for him is silence: "I need more _you_."

He tries to speak again but her fingers press his lips into stillness and she lets her hands move impulsively to his eyelids, feels them hurriedly flutter shut as her fingers approach. The skin there is so delicate and the eyeballs below it firm, round and twitching restively. She thinks of the color of his pupils and wishes she could feel it somehow.

It's a short trip to his hair; her palms slide over strands so short it's almost like smoothing velvet back and forth. Her hands move from forehead to nape–random, yet needy. She feels him shiver a little.

"Rose?" She can hear him trying to bring his voice back from somewhere it doesn't usually reside.

"I need to," she whispers.

He lets her.

Her hands make the trip down the back of his neck, over his shoulders and slip to his chest. Cool leather there, only warm at all because he's underneath it. It muffles the two syncopated heartbeats that seem a little fast.

She slides her hands under the leather. He starts a little and gasps quietly. "Sorry," he says in a soft croak. "Surprised me a bit."

But as her hands begin moving slowly over his pectorals, she's fairly sure she hears the gasp again.

A kind of primal comfort washes quietly through her as she feels her way across the span of him, for once touching him unguardedly. Terror has paradoxically made her fearless. Her hands move down the thin, abrasive wool covering his torso, count his ribs on the way around to his back, settle in the small of it. It's him, she knows it is but without sight she needs tactile reminders of the quirks she normally takes in with her eyes, normally takes a little for granted.

His hand slides onto her cheek.

Rose jolts with the contact, a brief moment of fear quickly dismissed. She didn't really consider how it might feel to be the one being explored. She feels warmth spread through her chest.

His hand drifts softly over her cheek, turns to run the backs of long fingers along her jaw. His other hand joins in and soon her face is cupped gently, till the hands move to stroke through her hair, fingering the strands as he reaches their ends and then diving back in to repeat the process. Dimly she realizes it's giving her goosebumps. Her hands have found the hem of his jumper and the mystery of his skin is calling her. She succumbs and her hands slip up his gloriously bare back; she hears the Doctor suck in a sharp breath. Her brain is too focused on the feel of him to spare a synapse for what that breath meant; he feels utterly _wonderful_, so real and present and _him_.

His hands have stroked over her shoulders, toyed playfully with the strings at the front of her ever-present hoodie and now rest just above her waist on either side; she can feel a soft deliciousness lingering everywhere he's touched. She feels the slight, restless pressure of his fingers urging her closer and goes forward till her chest bumps his. His hands begin roaming her sides, framing her hips one minute and flirting with the sides of her breasts the next. She realizes her own hands are contemplating what it would be like to slip below the waistband of his trousers, and that she probably won't stop them should they decide to try. She realizes she's tasting the Doctor's breath as he breathes roughly, right next to her lips. She realizes he must be tasting her breath, because she's panting too.

When did this turn from identification into something else?

They're so close. The presence of him radiates into her skin. She still hears whooshing but it's mostly made up of the blood rushing in her ears. Her head's no clearer than when she started, but for a vastly more compelling reason.

"I need more you," she repeats in a voice that's much, much different.

"Oh Rose, so do I," he breathes against her mouth, just before he kisses her.

She doesn't know how she thought a torso and arms could feel anonymous, because right now they're enclosing her and she's drowning in him, just him and no one else. The addition of his lips and his taste and his soft, muffled moans is making the experience so intimate, a feast of things she's always wanted to know.

Large hands cradling the back of her head, turning it to give him the most, best access to her mouth and soon her neck. The feel of his warm, lingering kisses there has her moaning and sputtering soft nonsense, her body so on fire she has no idea where all this feeling can go.

She's drunk on the idea that it's HIM, that she has HIM–it's the most unbelievable and intoxicating facet of all. The idea that this beautiful, powerful, soulful, silly, entrancing, alien man can be reduced to want and in doing so want HER is...is just more than she can believe or ever express sufficient gratitude for just now.

And they've only just started.

He's murmuring her name, saying it raptly and with so much love she can hardly keep herself upright. She considers that with the way he's making her feel, she's not going to want to be upright for much longer anyway.

His solid back and shoulders under her grasping hands. His thick, heavy arms holding her to him. The taste and feel of his tongue in her mouth and her tongue in his. She fights the cool leather off the back of her invisible man.

When logistics make them separate he talks: "So long, Rose, so long I've wanted to do this..."

"Why haven't we?" she pants, taking their separation as an opportunity to further fumble for the hem of his jumper and pull it upward, thrilling silently as her fingers brush his tight, smooth belly.

"Too afraid, Rose, you..." he's muffled briefly till the wool clears his face. "...you just mean _everything_," he chokes. His hands clutch at her waist and he pulls her in as though this separation has been intolerably long. She diverts his hands into taking off her hoodie and top, an alternative they begin immediately.

"Get me naked," she whispers. "I wanna feel it's you doing."

He groans softly somewhere in the dark and then his hands are brushing over her, stripping coverings away and laying more and more of her bare, all of it aching with the anticipation of contact with him. _It's him,_ her mind supplies, reeling with the knowledge, _he's choosing me, he wants me..._

"Oh Rose..." he sighs when she's naked.

"Can you see me at all?" she wonders.

"Yes," he whispers raptly.

She jolts deliciously as his hand covers her breast, moans unselfconsciously. His other hand joins in on her other breast and it's instant sensory overload.

"Can you see me, even a little?" he asks.

"No," she gasps, "and I want to. I _so_ want to."

"Not missin' much," he jokes shyly.

Rose groans and reaches out blindly, her hand finding his crotch on the first try–his naked, pulsing, fully erect penis suddenly in her hand and his hoarse, surprised cry ringing out near her ear. When did he strip off? And how can she ever survive the ruthless arousal wringing out her insides?

"This feels like 'much'," she croaks, wrapping her hand around to stroke it, feeling down and rolling his balls softly in her palm. "And oh god, Doctor, everythin' about you, I love it all. There's nothin' about you I ever want to miss."

His hands reach around her with a growl and she's pulled flush against him and both cry out in relief and joy. The Doctor sounds just as ecstatic as Rose feels at finally feeling each other this way–skin to skin–the way she's always wanted to. Her disbelief and gratitude multiply. Suddenly they're completely enmeshed as they kiss as hard as they can, feel and touch and grab and caress every part of each other that has ever caught their eyes or their imaginations. It goes on and on. Her lips and finger pads send the most breathtaking information back to her brain.

"You said 'love', Rose Tyler," he growls into her neck, stopping to gasp. She wonders if she really does feel tears on her skin from where his face has nuzzled. "You've gone and done it. Now I'm gonna show you love like you never imagined existed, now and every moment forward for the rest of your stupidly short life."

She takes his firm, invisible face in her hands and pulls it up to eye level, seeing nothing. She feels the tears for sure, kisses their trails. "If anyone can figure out a way for me to live forever, it's you," she says, getting teary herself. "And you'd best start workin' on it, because I want to stay with you forever, as long as _you_ live. I'm yours."

The Doctor moans softly. "Say that again."

"I'm yours," she says between kisses. "_God_ I wish I could see you."

She feels a sudden rush of movement that ends with her hoisted into the Doctor's arms and then laid back onto the wide, thick blanket they'd been sitting on. He parts her knees with his body and shoves between them, pushing her back. His crotch lands firmly against hers.

"Feel me instead, in the meantime," he commands. Rose clamps her eyes shut against the rush of arousal and surrenders to him kissing her, all over.

The next half hour is all about his lips on her skin and his tongue leaving cooling trails; her hands clutching at his head as her nipples are engulfed in his warm, wet mouth and her back arches; the scratch of the hair on his bare legs as they twine with hers. It's the shivery anticipation as his kisses go low on her belly, the torture as he teases her inner thighs with lips and airy caresses, the feel of him smiling against her skin as she demands he stop teasing, the scream she lets out in the unnatural silence as he complies.

It's about panting as he learns her with his mouth, handfuls of battered padded work blanket crushed in her fists. It's about coming so hard she sees stars, the first thing she's seen in hours, and pulling him up by the underarms so she can lay his hard, lanky, sweet body atop her and kiss herself off of him. It's about his delicious weight crushing them together and the pressure of his rock hard cock against her slippery clit as they move, till she begs him to put it inside. It's about his hand fumbling between them, his cock nudging her opening till he's more than nudging, he's entering and her finally getting to take that arse in her hands and push him in as deep as he'll go.

Then it's sighing and comfort and union, tightness in her throat from loving him. It's his whispers in her ear as he moves, telling her over and over again how dear she is. It's those whispers turning into other sounds, his breath against her neck and his chest brushing hers and him losing the thread as his body thrills higher and higher. It's her legs tight around his waist as he rocks her, becoming less and less composed, showing her a kind of erotic abandon that shoots arousal through her. It's them as she manages to grind herself into another screaming orgasm perfectly timed with the sound of him losing every bit of sense he ever had, just for a moment, just for her.

* * *

><p>She wakes up in his arms, the two of them wrapped in the blanket via the sides pulled up and over themselves. There's a faint amber glow around, the illumination of the TARDIS at partial power.<p>

Rose raises herself a bit, enough to see the Doctor's face without disturbing him–she thinks, until he cracks one eye open at her and raises the eyebrow above it for good measure. _Well, as long as you're awake_, she thinks and sits up quickly, whooshing the covers away and making the Doctor yelp in fake outrage at the rush of cold air. But there he is, finally bare _and _visible and she just drinks him in, the length of him (in more ways than one) and almost chokes up at how beautiful she finds him.

After a few moments of unabashed observation he breaks: "Gonna gawp all day?" But his face isn't annoyed, anything but. It holds something humble, grateful.

"Might do," she retorts, suddenly pretending her inspection is something very official and important and snooty. She looks around his various parts, picks up his penis and checks officiously underneath. The Doctor rolls his eyes and also her on top of him.

Rose grins down until her eyes soften just a bit. "You said 'love', she reminds him.

"You said it first."

"I did," she nods. "Meant it."

"Me too," he confirms softly.

Her eyes shine at him. "So what happens now?"

"Now?" He muses a moment. "Now is when I start considering takin' out all the TARDIS light fixtures." He yelps happily as she swats him. "Oi! You can't say you didn't enjoy the outcome!"

Finding swatting ineffective, Rose tries kissing to shut him up and much prefers the results.


End file.
